Engineer--that once was the case, but no more. Just the other night I had a Mosel Riesling that came in a brown bottle, and it was not a hock bottle, but one of those long-necked Alsatian style bottles (St. Urbans-Hof 2003).

It was great because I was doing a class on Riesling and the students were tasting blind. Some of them tried cheating by looking at the bottles--didn't work.

Incidentally, the tasting included Mosel, Alsace, Washington, Oregon and Finger Lakes. Unanimous decision of the class--the other regions should be forced to sign a no-compete contract with the Finger Lakes. The FLakes wines outpaced every one of the others. The Washington and Oregon stuff was mainly one-dimensional, and that dimension was sugar.

The Mosel suffered from H2S and the Alsatian--Trimbach 2002--was a flabby waste of dollars.